If the past 99 months have taught us anything, it's that you folks have about as wide a range of tastes as any other group in the world. We've published articles about everything from traffic intersections to Victorian mannerisms, and we keep pushing our thematic limits. So for Pyramid #3/100: Pyramid Secrets, we decided to step back from theme and do a bit of celebrating . . . not just our centennial issue, but also our success using Amazon CreateSpace to bring GURPS books back into print and using Kickstarter to bring Dungeon Fantasy to the masses. Ready to party?

GURPS Power-Ups 5: Impulse Buys introduced new ways to put meta-game power into the players' hands, but there's always room for better Impulse Control. Christopher Rice spins those simple rules into a full system, in which the players and GM can bid points against each other while amassing more via careful roleplaying. It's easy to use, exciting, and even comes with new "impulse buys" to spend those points on.

GURPS High-Tech demonstrates the success of countless firearms throughout the years, but what about those which almost made it? In Infinite Weapons, Hans-Christian Vortisch rescues guns which might have become huge successes in another timeline, from repeating flintlocks to synthetic assassins' pistols. Use these to add color and flavor to your GURPS Infinite Worlds game -- or any other campaign!

GURPS Ultra-Tech's vignettes feature a unique group of TL12 secret agents: The Galactic Operations Directorate. And in this month's Eidetic Memory, David Pulver expands not only this exciting agency, but also their enemies, the Yezendi Antimatter Syndicate. And this isn't just fluff; enjoy full GURPS Boardroom and Curia stats for both groups, a new GURPS Spaceships craft, and a new racial template for the Yezendi.

GURPS Low-Tech and GURPS Ultra-Tech overlap in only a few ways, and the fact that clothing is one of them shows how humanity takes pains to be Fashion Forward. Matt Riggsby provides detailed weights and costs for a wide range of apparel, adds easy rules to emulate the fickle world of fashion, and then offers new sci-fi options like kinetic fabric, video cloth, and force suits.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 7: Clerics introduced variety to holy and unholy delvers, and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 17: Guilds added a social side to the game. So it's only natural that some delvers would worship the forces of trade, wealth, and prosperity . . . that is, the Gods of Commerce. New author Christopher Conrad and I make it easy to build clerics and holy warriors who battle evil in the market square as well as in deep dungeons.

GURPS Martial Arts gave us new hit locations and options for realistic injury. But when that's not enough for your gritty, down-to-earth game, whip out Realistic Injury, Expanded. Peter Dell'Orto offers new options for everything from broken teeth to "cauliflower ear," with a sliding scale so you can decide whether every fight will end with lasting effects.

And it's no secret that this month's Random Thought Table takes a careful look at how long -- or short -- an adventure can be and still deserve the name.

Christopher "Ghostdancer" Rice worked tirelessly to address my comments when I saw the potential for his article (which originally diverged a bit from PU5) to become a true expansion for that book. I strongly recommend giving this system a try; he isn't exaggerating when he says it can replace Luck, etc.

And Christopher "not on these forums" Conrad is my Dungeon Fantasy GM; he came up with the core ideas of our article when one of our players asked, "Where are the gods of trade and money?" I'm really proud of what we ended up with, and it's worked out great for that Tycoon-heavy PC in our games.

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Reverend Pee Kitty of the Order Malkavian-Dobbsian (Twitter) (LJ)

It was a good issue, hope people got the cover art but ya know someones going to criticize it. On W23 I thought it was a bug and the picture didint get uploaded. Only saw the real cover when I opened the issue up. magazine not available at present so I wont use the article names.

2 articles are likely to be of use to me. The Impulse buy article was a nice expansion. First I was thinking ok, we get a few new examples but we already have this in Power Ups, even if its kind of a sidebar. But nice examples anyway. I even liked the box of alternative names.
However then I got to the example replacements for luck type abilities.The article is really useful and works better as a Narrative or coincidental magic system than my house use of the system from Impulse Buys

The fashion article was also useful and interesting, though a little more bling would have been nice. Love the Force field suit.

Random Thoughts have good ideas for helping GMs.

The rest were of course well written but unlikely to see use in my campaign or group. My only negative comment was I wish there had been a Conspiracy or Mystery type crunch thing. Of course you could do that with Ghostdancers article.... IP (Aspected, Conspiracies; -20%) and bonus points for new discovery or connections made and possibly thwarted.

Impulse Control I'm very happy to see finally in print, and I'll be expanding my group's already-heavy use of IP to include what it offers. As I and one of my players were reading it, we both looked at each other and said the same character's name when looking at the Big Entrance option.

Infinite Weapons I would have bought just for the stats on the CAWS alone, and has several other (a)historical gems besides.

The Galactic Operations Directorate is a great in-depth look into the world of UT's vignettes — though I'm not sure I'd want to play in it, it's fun to read.

Fashion Forward comes with impeccable timing, just as I'm working on a cyberpunk game. i do have one minor quibble — the clothing weights offered in there seem to be pegged at the Basic Set's clothing weights, while High-Tech says TL8+ clothing is half that weight thanks to modern fabrics. Still, it's easy enough to say the weights of listed garments can vary from 50% to 200% the listed value based on the fabric and the cut.

Gods of Commerce offers a nice expansion to the selection of deific portfolios available, and I've already got a character in mind to use it for the next DF game I wind up in. Hafta convince the GM to use Traits for Town from a previous issue, though...

Realistic Injury, Expanded is going to see regular use, but I think poor Bruno is going to go crazy trying to fit yet more hit location effects into her wonderful hit location cheat-sheet (time for a page 3?).

Briefly, an Adventure... well, nothing my group does is ever brief, and we still manage to hold marathon eight-ten-twelve-fifteen-hour gaming sessions on an almost-weekly basis, even after more than ten years of this. Still, there are valuable points to mine here.

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In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

Yeah, I had no idea when it was going to make it up, so I just figured I'd do the promo stuff when I got back home from running my ATE game.

Quote:

It was a good issue, hope people got the cover art but ya know someones going to criticize it. On W23 I thought it was a bug and the picture didint get uploaded.

Heh, I thought the exact same thing until I squinted and realized that it just didn't come through great in the thumbnail. Well, maybe that'll at least generate some curiosity clicks. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Celti

Gods of Commerce offers a nice expansion to the selection of deific portfolios available, and I've already got a character in mind to use it for the next DF game I wind up in. Hafta convince the GM to use Traits for Town from a previous issue, though...

Do you have DF17? If so, I find that some GMs consider the named & numbered books to hold more canonical weight than articles, so maybe toss that in the GM's lap instead of Traits for Town? (We love DF17; Christopher started off his campaign with a document detailing all of the guilds that were available, with custom assistance lists for most of 'em.)

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Reverend Pee Kitty of the Order Malkavian-Dobbsian (Twitter) (LJ)

Do you have DF17? If so, I find that some GMs consider the named & numbered books to hold more canonical weight than articles, so maybe toss that in the GM's lap instead of Traits for Town? (We love DF17; Christopher started off his campaign with a document detailing all of the guilds that were available, with custom assistance lists for most of 'em.)

I in fact own every single DF book (and will own the DFRPG when it arrives this fall) — it's not a question of canonical weight but of the type of game he wants to run. That game will be waiting well down in the year's schedule, though, so I've got time to convince him. ;-)

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In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

By the way, if anyone wants a GDF for "Gods of Commerce," here you go. I created this for our game's character creation. I didn't make new templates, but all of the traits you need to build a Commerce cleric or holy warrior are in there. As a bonus, it also includes a character sheet for James Trima.

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Reverend Pee Kitty of the Order Malkavian-Dobbsian (Twitter) (LJ)

Christopher "Ghostdancer" Rice worked tirelessly to address my comments when I saw the potential for his article (which originally diverged a bit from PU5) to become a true expansion for that book. I strongly recommend giving this system a try; he isn't exaggerating when he says it can replace Luck, etc.

And Christopher "not on these forums" Conrad is my Dungeon Fantasy GM; he came up with the core ideas of our article when one of our players asked, "Where are the gods of trade and money?" I'm really proud of what we ended up with, and it's worked out great for that Tycoon-heavy PC in our games.

A God of Commerce is one of the primary deities in my D&D 5e campaign; one of the defining features of their cult is the ability to create and enforce contracts via divine magic.

My players have damned their soul-bound contract's open-ended clauses rather a few times as what at first seemed like a simple mission wound up requiring quite a bit more.